Billion-Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last Twenty-five Years

by Paul B. Carroll, Chunka Mui

Overview

”This book is your chance to learn from others’ mistakes.”— Entrepreneur

In the 1960s, IBM CEO Tom Watson called an executive into his office after his venture lost $10 million. The man assumed he was being fired. Watson told him, “Fired? Hell, I spent $10 million educating you. I just want to be sure you learned the right lessons.”

There are thousands of books about successful companies but virtually none about the lessons to be learned from those that crash and burn. Now Paul Carroll and Chunka Mui draw on research into more than 750 flameouts to reveal the seven biggest reasons for business failure.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781591842897
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/25/2009
Edition description:	Updated
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Paul B. Carroll wrote for The Wall Street Journal for seventeen years. The author of Big Blues,/I, he founded Context, the first "new economy" magazine, in 1997. Now a freelance writer, he lives outside Sacramento, California.

Chunka Mui is the coauthor of the major business bestseller Unleashing the Killer App and a fellow at Diamond Management and Technology Consultants. He lectures and consults widely on strategy and innovation, and lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Editorial Reviews

Carroll (Big Blues) and Mui (Unleashing the Killer App) collaborate to perform an autopsy on some of the most spectacular business failures and corporate disasters in recent times, hunting down the fatal strategies responsible. The authors examine more than 750 "inexcusable" corporate collapses, neatly cataloguing them into eight common "failure patterns": doomed practices, including the "Illusion of Synergies," as illustrated by the ruinous merger attempts by Sears and Dean Witter; "Faulty Financial Engineering," as conducted by Tyco and Revco; "Staying the (Misguided) Course Too Long," a sin committed by Kodak, which missed the boat on digital photography; and "Consolidation Blues," as depicted by U.S. Airways, which crashed as a consequence of buying up too many companies too quickly. While there are assuredly lessons in defeat and the authors' detailed analysis and bracing honesty is welcome, readers hoping for a more encouraging or inspirational business book might find Carroll and Mui's avalanche of disastrous failures, avoidable bankruptcies and destruction of shareholder value a depressing-if highly instructive-read. (Sept.)

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Publishers Weekly

Jim Bond's low-key performance works well with this fascinating business lesson. His pleasant voice and deliberate pace energize the lengthy, weighty text. The material itself is based on a methodical study of large corporate failures from which the authors have abstracted seven types of strategic errors. These are judgment problems that appear at the CEO and board-of-director levels of large public companies, but the human dimension in the authors' writing will make their abstractions useful to leaders in all types of businesses. In spite of its academic tone, the text holds one’s attention because of its compelling examples, methodical approach, and Bond's top-shelf interpretation. T.W. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2009 - AudioFile